February may be the shortest month of the year, but there’s no reason to slow down on the blogging front. After a fairly dry January, I’m hoping to kick myself up a notch this month. I fully expect farmwork to drop on me like a tonne of bricks at any moment, but until that point, the science fiction train stops for no-one! Here are some of my plans for the month ahead.

TBR

Having wrapped up a lot of older works last month, February will see me return to the twenty-first century. My first priority is getting on top of the Star Trek situation. I’ve got two complete trilogies ahead of me, and a handful of random books too. I’ll be starting the month with the Voyager: String Theory trilogy, which will essentially complete my Voyager collection. I don’t think I’ll have time to read the Prey trilogy as well, but if I need some easier reading when work gets hectic, that’s the direction I’ll be looking in.

One book I really need to get round to reading is Jose Saramago’s Blindness. This is quite some way out of my usual field, but it was a suggestion from the Media Death Cult Secret Santa over on Discord, so I owe it a look. Another standalone I’ll be tackling is Michael Mammay’s The Misfit Soldier. It sounds a little different to his previous work, so I’m interested to see how the change in style works out.

I also intend to do a bit of general TBR tidying by reading James P. Hogan’s Mision to Minerva and Mark L. van Name’s Jump Gate Twist, which cleara whole publishing house of my TBR for the time being. Hogan is of particular interest to me, because it’s unusual to see a British author writing for such a famously Amrican publisher as Baen. With Baen, you know you’re going to get some old-school space adventure, so I look forward to both of these books.

Forming the loose tail of my reading plans are the start of three different series. Earth Unaware, by Orson Scott Card, Andromeda’s Fall, by William C. Dietz, and finally Greg Bear’s Cryptum. All of these have the potential to get me hooked on much larger universes, so I’ll keep you posted on what I decide to continue with.

AND BEYOND

Work on my Discord server stalled due to real life, but is now back on track and I hope to have it active by the end of this month. There’ll be an annoucement when it eventually goes live.

For the past month I’ve been playing through the Halo: Master Chief Collection in preparation for my upcoming dive into that world’s literary canon. With only ODST and Halo 4 to complete, there’s a decent chance I’ll be finished by the end of the month. I’ll be doing a write-up of some kind to celebrate, and then I’ll be free to start reading.

RELEASE SCHEDULE

17th – Star Trek: Picard, Season 3 (weekly release)

I remain unconvinced that removing a cast of new characters and bringing back old favourites was the right decision for Picard, but I have to say that the upcoming final season does look rather good. There’s certainly a lot of hype for it, and everything I’ve seen suggests it will be stronger than the second season, so I look forward to going on one final voyage with Patrick Stweart and company.